Roman Art

ROMAN ART

FEROCIOUS SHE WOLF TURNS TOWARD us with a vicious snarl. Her tense body thin flanks and protruding ribs contrast with her heavy, milk filled teats. Incongruously, she suckles two active chubby little boys. We are looking at the most famous symbol of Rome: the legendary wolf who nourished and saved the city's founder Romulus and his twin brother Remus. According to a Roman legend, the twin sons of the god Mars and a mortal woman were left to die on the banks of the Tiber River by their wicked uncle. A she-wolf discovered the infants and nursed them in place of her own pups the twins were later raised by a shepherd. When they reached adulthood the twins decided to build a city near the spot where the wolf had rescued them according to tradition in the year 753 Ð"‚Ð"'Ð"....

This composite sculptural group of wolf and boys suggests the complexities of art history on the Italian peninsula. An early people called Etruscans created the bronze wolf about 500 Ð"‚Ð"'Ð"... and Romans added the sculpture of children to it in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century CE. This figure is thus a fitting image for the way the themes and styles of the Etruscans and the later Romans combined.

We know that a statue of a wolfÐ'--and sometimes even a live wolf in a cageÐ'--stood on the Capitolme Hill: the governmental and religious center of ancient Rome. But whether the wolf is the same sculpture that Romans saw then is far from certain. According to tradition, the original bronze wolf was struck by lightning and buried. The documented history of this She Wolf begins in the tenth century CE, when it was rediscovered and placed outside the Lateran Palace, the home of the pope. At that time statues of two small men stood under the wolf personifying the alliance between the Romans and their former enemies from central Italy, the Sabines. But in the later Middle Ages people mistook the figures for children and identified the sculpture with the founding of Rome. During the Renaissance Romans wanted more specific imagery and added the twins we see here. Pope Sixtus IV (papacy 1471-84 CE) had the sculpture moved from his palace to the Capitolme Hill. Today the She Wolf maintains her wary pose in a museum there.

ROME

After the formation of the Roman Republic in 509 Ð"ÑžÐ"±Ð"Ґ the Romans expanded the borders of their realm through near continuous warfare At its greatest extent in the early second century ce the Roman Empire reached from the Euphrates River m southwest Asia to Scotland. The vast territory ringed the Mediterranean SeaÐ'--"mare nostrum" or Ð''our sea' the Ro mans called it. As the Romans absorbed the peoples they conquered, they imposed on them a legal, administrative and cultural structure that endured for some five centuriesÐ'--in the eastern Mediterranean until the fifteenth century ceÐ'--and left a lasting mark on the civilizations that emerged in Europe.

ORIGINS OF ROME

These conquering peoples saw themselves not surprisingly in heroic terms and attributed heroic origins to their ancestors. According to one popular legend rendered in epic verse by the poet Virgil (70-19 Ð"ÑžÐ"±Ð"Ґ) in the Aeneid, the Roman people were the offspring of Aeneas: a Trojan who was the mortal son of the goddess Venus. Thanks to his mother s intervention with Jupiter Aeneas and some companions escaped from burning Troy and made their way to Italy. There they settled at the mouth of the Tiber. Their sons were the Romans: the people who in fulfillment of a promise by Jupiter to Venus were destined to rule the world. Another popular legend told the story of Rome s founding by Romulus and Remus, the twin sons of Mars the god of war.

Archaeologists and historians have developed a more mundane picture of Rome s origins. In Neolithic times groups of people who spoke a common languageÐ'--LatinÐ'--settled in permanent villages on the plains of Latium, south of the Tiber River as well as on the Palatine - one of the seven hills that would eventually become Rome. These first settlements were little more than clusters of small round huts but by the sixth century Ð"ÑžÐ"±Ð"Ґ Rome had developed into a major transportation hub and trading center.

ROMAN RELIGION

Although the Romans had gods of their own (see Distinctively Roman Gods), like the Etruscans they too adopted many Greek gods and myths (this chapter uses the Roman form of Greek names) and assimilated Greek religious beliefs and practices into a form of state religion. To the Greek pantheon they added their own deified emperors, in part to maintain the allegiance of the culturally diverse populations of the empire. Worship of ancient gods mingled with homage to past rulers, and oaths of allegiance to the living ruler made the official religion a political dutyÐ'--increasingly ritualized, perfunctory, and distant from the everyday life of the average person. As a result, many Romans adopted the more personal religious beliefs of the people they had conquered, the so-called mystery religions. Worship of Isis and Osiris from Egypt, Cybele (the Great Mother) from Anatolia, the hero-god Mithras from Persia, and the single, all-powerful God of Judaism and Christianity from Palestine challenged the Roman establishment. These unauthorized religions flourished alongside the state religion, with its Olympian deities and deified emperors, despite occasional government efforts to suppress them.

DISTINCTIVELY ROMAN GODS

The previous chapter gives a comprehensive list of Greek gods and their Roman counterparts. The Romans, however, honored some deities that were not found in Greece. They include:

Fortuna goddess of fate (fortune)

Priapus god of fertility

Saturn god of harvests

Janus god of beginnings and endings;

has two faces, enabling him to

look forward and backward

Pomona goddess of gardens and orchards

Terminus god of boundaries

Early Rome was governed by kings and an advisory body of leading citizens called the Senate. The population fell into two classes: a wealthy and powerful upper class, the patricians, and a lower class, the plebeians. The last kings of Rome were members of an Etruscan family,